Are you drinking fake wine?

Inside a climate-controlled storage facility somewhere in
southern England, dizzying quantities of fine wine lie behind thick
doors armed with biometric locks. Some of the bottles here are
worth £25,000 each - or about £400 for a modest sip. I cradle with
as much care as I would a newborn baby an exceptionally good
Bordeaux. The date is early Sixties, the label is ornate and the
wine's origins in the exclusive Pomerol commune makes it one of the
world's most sought-after grand-cru vintages.

'You won't find any of this on the market in Europe at the
moment,' says my guide, who has agreed to talk on the strict
condition that neither his nor the bottle's identity - nor even our
location - are revealed. 'It's one of the rarest and most highly
rated wines of the last century.' Were it to become available
today, it would fetch tens of thousands of pounds. Yet it will
never be sold.

'Look a little closer at the label here,' the wine man says,
pointing his little finger at the bottom-left corner. A good three
times smaller than the letters you are reading now, the words
'Imprimé en France' reveal where the paper was printed more than 50
years ago. 'Does anything look strange to you?' A second glance
reveals that the 'I' of 'Imprimé ' is missing. Perhaps it got
rubbed off, although the paper shows no signs of wear.
Inexplicably, the word also includes a glaring typo. The label
reads: 'mpriné en France'. While the bottle otherwise looks every
bit the part, a schoolboy error reveals it as a fake - the work of
a skilled if occasionally careless counterfeiter who now resides in
a similarly secure facility with the word 'prison' on the
front.

The market for fine wines has increased by more than 23.4 per
cent in the past decade, and the British wine market alone is
expected to grow in value by more than £13bn by 2018. And hand in
hand with this incredible growth - and the incredible sums involved
- is a huge increase in wine fraud, a crime seemingly short on
consequence (unless you've just sunk £100,000 on a case of Château
Le Faux Cher), but long on high-stakes drama. As markets and
palates have inflated prices of the rarest and finest Bordeaux and
Burgundies, counterfeiters have created cults of personality about
themselves as covers for plots to fool a world of expansive wallets
and expensive reputations.

'And we're really looking at the tip of the iceberg,' says
Maureen Downey, an American consultant and self-styled wine
detective. Downey alone could inspire a Hollywood script. Equal
parts Hercule Poirot and Erin Brockovich, she fearlessly pursues
fakes and fraudsters from her base in San Francisco. 'For every
story that you hear about, there are 10 stories behind it - because
these people do a very good
job of covering their asses. We're seeing more sources of
counterfeit wine, but only one guy is in prison. One guy!'

That guy is Rudy Kurniawan. He and Hardy Rodenstock, a fellow
alleged counterfeiter with a crazy backstory and fake name (the
men's real names are, respectively, Zhen Wang Huang and Meinhard
Görke), burst into the most rarefied level of the trade before
eventually suffocating under suspicion and litigation. Downey
estimates that the wine still in circulation made by Kurniawan
alone has a street value of £380m. 'We're talking about tens of
thousands of bottles,' she adds. 'He was doing it for 10
years.'

Kurniawan was a high-rolling, Ferrari-driving Los Angeles
collector who epitomised an emerging scene of brash American
oenophiles. In the mid-to-late 2000s, he hosted bacchanalian
dinners, once blowing $250,000 (then £120,000) on wine and always
asking for the empties to be returned to him. He earned the
nickname 'Dr Conti' for his fondness for Romanée-Conti, the
tiny and prestigious domaine in Burgundy. At two auctions in 2006,
he sold rare wines for more than $35m (then £20m).

But Kurniawan's wines included vintages that had never been
bottled. Other discrepancies and flaws emerged. Eventually Bill
Koch, a billionaire American collector and member of a family of
industrialists, sued him. Wronged producers piled on, and in
2012 the FBI raided Kurniawan's home. They found scores of old
bottles, corking equipment, stacks of forged labels and the real
wines he would blend to make fakes. Home for Kurniawan until 2021
at least is a jail 100 miles north of LA, where I sent him a
friendly letter (sample question: 'how's prison?'). At the time of
writing, he has not replied.

Water, milk, ashes and even lead have been openly added to wine
through the ages to make it more drinkable. But misleading
practices date back centuries too. More than 2,000 years ago, Pliny
the Elder noted that 'not even our nobility ever enjoys wines that
are genuine'. In 1709, the English essayist Joseph Addison wrote in
Tatler of the 'fraternity of chymical operators..., who
squeeze Bourdeaux out of a sloe and draw Champagne from an
apple'.

Spirits containing poisonous methanol have killed hundreds in
Turkey and India in the past year. But when fraudsters mess with
fine wine, they tend to pour blends of decent, comparable plonk
into old bottles, often over the original sediment, the appearance
of which is hard to fake. 'Kurniawan's recipe for a 1945 Mouton is
a combination of old and young Château Palmer and Californian
cabernet,' says Downey, who last year launched Winefraud.com as an
industry resource. Labels can be scanned, edited and
slapped onto refilled bottles. They are then typically sold
to unsuspecting or complicit middlemen or auction houses.

Even when wine is sold to be drunk, rather than to collect
dust and zeros, getting the taste right can be the lowest
priority, particularly when so few people have encountered the
rarest vintages. As a result, counterfeiters have been able not
only to get away with it, but also to prime tongues for
further fakes. 'It's likely that the major tasting notes that we
have on many of the oldest and rarest wines are based on
counterfeits,' Downey says. 'We don't know what the real wine
tastes like.' She also points out that many of those notes, which
are used for commercial purposes, were made under the influence
(swallowing was and is mandatory at some tastings, and the best
stuff is served last. 'You don't spit away history,' Hardy
Rodenstock was known to say).

Downey is a rare loud voice in fine wine. The man in the storage
facility was one of many who preferred not to be named in this
story. Many others declined to speak at all. There is a palpable
fear of litigation, loss of reputation and alarmism among would-be
buyers. 'We don't want our customers to think everything is fake,'
one merchant says. And he's right - not everyone with expensively
stocked cellars need panic. But Downey says that the lessons of the
Kurniawan scandal have not been learned, and that unknowable
quantities of fake wine - not all of it his - slosh around the
market. 'Counterfeit wine has itself become a cottage industry,'
she explains. 'Vendors are agreeing to compensate for bad
purchases, but only if they get the wine back with a non-disclosure
agreement. They then resell the wine, after the prices have
risen dramatically, and profit twice on counterfeits.' Meanwhile,
she adds, while Kurniawan is locked up, 'nobody who profited from
his crimes has been held accountable'.

Downey says this explicit trade in fakes typically goes on
outside the secure supply chains between producers and the
established auction houses and merchants. But longer chains are
vulnerable and, across the industry, blind eyes are turned and
suspicious cases quietly sent back. 'I know that, legally, silence
is not consent,' she adds. 'But morally and ethically, it is. We
have an industry where shady people thrive because nobody speaks
out.'

As well as silence and subjectivity, Hardy Rodenstock's tale
reveals the power of charm and chutzpah in a trade that is
vulnerable - not least after a few drinks - to stories that seem
too good not to be true. In 1985, the debonair German said he
discovered, in a forgotten Parisian cellar, a cache of 200-year-
old bottles from the top chateaux - Lafite, Yquem, Mouton. This
would have been exciting enough, but each bottle was also etched
with the initials of Thomas Jefferson, the American Founding
Father, who fell in love with wine when he lived in
France in the 1780s. Malcolm Forbes, the late billionaire
publisher, bought a 1787 Lafite at auction for £105,000 (triple
that to get today's money), a record for a single bottle, and
Koch bought four more for half a million dollars. Rodenstock
became a star and went on to unearth more exceptional wine. At a
dinner in 1998, guests sunk two Jeffersons among Yquem vintages
spanning 125 years. 'Amazingly, they didn't taste over the hill or
oxidised,' one journalist noted. 'The 1784 tasted as if it were
decades younger.'

By 2005, serious doubts about Rodenstock had surfaced. The
Thomas Jefferson Foundation said they did not believe the bottles
ever belonged to the former US president. Koch employed a
retired FBI agent to investigate further. Years of legal wrangling
followed, but the German successfully argued that he remained
outside the jurisdiction of the US courts. He has always
strongly denied faking anything, but today keeps an
uncharacteristically low profile.

Koch, who is 76, has spent many more millions pursuing
fraudsters than he ever lost on fake wine. He declined to talk to
Tatler, but has previously discussed twin motives for his mission.
The first is the pleasure he finds in suing bad guys (he can afford
it - Forbes puts his wealth at £1.3bn), but he also decries the
'code of silence' in the industry and among collectors. 'I'm the
only guy who's blowing the whistle on it,' he said in 2013.Michael
Egan, who is from England but now based in Bordeaux, is another
wine consultant turned detective who is unafraid to speak
out. He was an expert witness in the Kurniawan trial and has
estimated that £70m of fakes change hands each year. He also warns
of a coming flood from China, where the luxury-goods boom has added
lift to soaring prices for top wines, making them appealing to
Chinese as well as European counterfeiters. 'At some stage, I'm
guessing people in China will realise they've been sold a pup and
that stock will start making its way onto the market here,' he says
from his home in Bordeaux.

At Hedonism Wines - the startling Mayfair store opened in 2012
by Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a Russian telecoms tycoon - Alistair Viner,
the wine buyer, is refreshingly honest when asked if he can
guarantee the authenticity of every bottle on the racks. 'No,
absolutely not,' he says, while the hum of the air-conditioning
competes with Edith Piaf. 'Counterfeiting is so unbelievably good
that I couldn't possibly say that.'

Yet, where parts of the industry are inclined to act, the
response to counterfeiting is strong. At Hedonism, where an
1811 Yquem can be yours for £98,700, Viner carefully inspects
new stock when not buying directly from respected auction
houses. He backs away at the slightest hint of a problem with
private buyers. Will Hargrove, head of fine wine at Corney
& Barrow, the exclusive UK agent for Romanée-Conti, says
the merchant now defaces bottles after tastings to reduce the risk
of refilling. 'We pretty much don't touch anything prior to 1982,
unless it's always been with us,' he adds.

At Berry Bros & Rudd, fine-wine buyer Philip Moulin has
just taken on a new job title - quality and authentication manager.
He leads a small, specially trained team in checking each new
bottle under 60-times magnification for signs of fraud. He accepts
that as a whole the industry has its head in the sand. 'We need to
be more transparent, otherwise it will come back and bite us all on
the bottom,' he says.

Technology is helping to identify fakes (where typos don't give
the game away). At the University of Bordeaux, Professor Philippe
Hubert passes gamma rays through bottles to determine if levels of
radioactive caesium isotopes date the wine to before or since the
start of nuclear-weapons testing. 'Usually, we measure around two
or three bottles per month at the request of the grand chateaux,'
the physicist says. 'One in three is fake.' Producers, meanwhile,
are variously using radio-frequency tags, holograms and invisible
markers in their attempts to secure the grands crus of the
future.

A reluctance to report fakes makes prosecution
vanishingly rare, and authorities prioritise the industrial
(and dangerous) counterfeiting of cheaper alcohol. 'There's a guy
in France who we know has been making large-format 1945
Romanée-Conti for decades,' Downey says. 'But law enforcement
isn't doing anything.' An exception was a big bust in 2013 of an
international Romanée-Conti counterfeiting ring based in Italy.
But that case has yet to come to court.

Much of the industry is inclined to play down the scale of the
problem, but Downey and Egan are tireless in fighting the war on
fakes. Downey remembers how her suspicions about Rodenstock in the
early 2000s, when she worked for auction houses in New York,
'pissed me off, because I was working 14-hour days, only for these
guys to destroy an upstanding industry I have always been proud to
work in'. Her work has angered many. 'If you stick your neck out,
you're going to get whacked,' she adds. 'Well - guess what? I'm the
one who sleeps well at night.'

How to spot a fake

By Michael Egan

Start by checking the capsule covering the top of
the bottle to see if it's loose enough to be prised off, which
could indicate that it has been taken off already. Also, if you
have a magnifying glass or jeweller's loupe of strong
magnification, inspect the label.

If the print pixellates or there are flecks of colour in a white
label, it may be a photocopy. Hold the bottle against a strong
light to check the sediment. If there is a lack of it in older
bottles (10 years or more), of Bordeaux and Rhône in particular,
this would be an anomaly.

Otherwise, ask a professional in the fine-wine trade to
have a look, or indeed get in touch with me. And only consider
buying newer wine from established merchants or auction houses who
work directly with producers.